Land of hope and dreams -- believe it

At his show Sunday in Perth, Australia, with the E Street Band, Bruce Springsteen sought to honor the Women’s Marches Saturday back home in the States. Here are his remarks, in their entirety:

“The E Street Band is glad to be here in Western Australia. But we're a long way from home, and our hearts and spirits are with the hundreds of thousands of women and men that marched yesterday in every city in America and in Melbourne who rallied against hate and division and in support of tolerance, inclusion, reproductive rights, civil rights, racial justice, LGBTQ rights, the environment, wage equality, gender equality, healthcare and immigrant rights. We stand with you. We are the new American resistance.”

It's the last bit in particular that hits the wrong note. 

Look, I have been a huge Springsteen fan for more than 40 years. I have happily been to more than three dozen of his shows, in North America and in Europe. I listen, maybe obsessively, to E Street channel on Sirius XM satellite radio.

It’s easy to understand that Springsteen is giving voice to the fear and anger many, many like-minded people feel right now, as Donald Trump takes over the U.S. presidency. No retreat, baby, no surrender. Sure. 

Moreover, President Obama recently awarded Springsteen the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and it turns out, according to the Springsteen website Backstreets, Bruce without publicity played a January 12 acoustic show at the White House for more than 200 White House staffers in the East Room, a thank-you for their service.

Springsteen also has been remarkably outspoken about Mr. Trump over the past few months, in a September interview with Rolling Stone calling Mr. Trump a “moron” and declaring the United States in “crisis,” which is hardly the case. You want crisis? Check out the west African republic of The Gambia. Washington just executed yet another peaceful transition of power.

You want hate and division? Pretty confident that nickel in your pocket features Thomas Jefferson, the third president. He’s one of the greats, right? Up on Mount Rushmore. In the Declaration of Independence, he wrote “all men are created equal.” He kept slaves, believed blacks were “racially inferior” and is now assumed to have had several children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.

Of course it can be problematic to judge behavior in the 18th and 19th centuries by 21st-century standards. Even so, there can be no debate that slavery is and was flat-out wrong and having sex with a slave is just — all the more horrifying.

Deep breath, everyone, before we go off about anything and everything with Mr. Trump.

Campaign rhetoric is rhetoric. Hillary Clinton appeared at the inauguration. If she can show that measure of class and respect, maybe we can all take a lesson and, as well, a deep breath.

As Mr. Obama said in his final news conference as president: “… At my core, I think we’re going to be OK.”

Springsteen, if you really want to get to it, is trying to have it both ways. In that September Rolling Stone piece, he said, "I think you have a limited amount of impact as an entertainer, performer or musician,” adding, “… I haven’t really lost faith in what I consider to be the small amount of impact that somebody in rock music might be able to have. I don’t think people go to musicians for their political points of view.” Yet Sunday in Perth it was, “We are the new American resistance.”

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not the 1930s or 1940s. People are not being rounded up and being sent to internment or concentration camps. Perth is not Vichy France. Neither is Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Nowhere in the United States is. We don’t need a “new American resistance.”

We need — see the example of Hillary Clinton, as hurtful as it must have been for her — to look for common ground.

We need to recognize, as Bruce Springsteen makes plain in so many of his songs, that we are all in this together.

Bad Scooter is all alone, you know, until the change is made uptown and the Big Man joins the band. Only then do they bust the city in half.  

Together.

One of the perils of the moment: there is way too much disagreement in far too many forums that is laced with entirely too much vitriol and rancor. We need way more disagreement with respect. This column is intended to mark disagreement but in every regard with respect. We are all in this together.

What does any or all of this have to do with the Olympics or international sport? What are these words doing in this space?

There are, in our fragile world, three universal languages: music, sport and math.

Math, especially higher math, is elegant, according to those who understand it.

Maybe in another lifetime.

So it’s music and sport.

There’s a great argument to be made, amid the populist movements in our world that have produced Brexit and the election of Mr. Trump, that — now more than ever — the world needs the message of the Olympics.

If you’re so inclined, it needs the Games more than ever as soon as possible in the United States, perhaps both as rejoinder and affirmation.

The International Olympic Committee, a few years back, used a great tagline that sums it all up: celebrate humanity.

Indeed, that’s what the Games — with all their flaws, like each of us — are about, and that’s why the opening and closing ceremony of an Olympics always sounds with music.

That music speaks to who we are at a particular moment:

The Russian Police Choir performing a rousing version at the opening ceremony in 2014 in Sochi of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” The Australian band Midnight Oil rocking out “Beds Are Burning” at the closing ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Games. Lionel Richie in that awesome sequined jacket-and-shirt combo at the closing ceremony of the 1984 Los Angeles Games, doing “All Night Long.”

The basic principle that the Olympic movement celebrates is simultaneously simple and yet incredibly profound.

It’s the very thing that Springsteen probably learned in high school in New Jersey in the ‘60s and for sure I learned at Northmont High School in rural Ohio, near Dayton, in the ‘70s: each and every person deserves to be treated with dignity, respect, civility, decency and tolerance and, as much as possible, every interaction with everyone you meet should be marked by humility and humanity.

And good manners.

Really, this is not that difficult.

If we all did this, instead of assuming the worst about each other or worrying that the sky is going to fall or that campaign rhetoric inevitably translates into destructive action, maybe we could do a lot better at talking with instead of at each other.

Like Bruce Springsteen says in many of his songs.

From 2007, and “Long Walk Home”:

“Here everybody has a neighbor

Everybody has a friend

Everybody has a reason to begin again

“My father said, ‘Son, we’re lucky in this town,

It’s a beautiful place to be born.

It just wraps its arms around you

Nobody crowds you and nobody goes it alone

“Your flag flyin’ over the courthouse

Means certain things are set in stone

Who we are and what we’ll do and what we won’t.”

One of Springsteen’s criticisms of Mr. Trump, as Springsteen also told Rolling Stone in September, is that “Trump’s thing is simple answers to very complex problems.”

Yet sometimes deriving simplicity from complexity is indeed just the thing. Maybe the one math lesson that sticks with everyone from high school: e = mc2.

The Springsteen catalogue runs to more than 300 songs. Arguably, the essence of it all springs from just two:

In “Born to Run,” from 1975, Springsteen asks the question that’s central to all of our lives: “I want to know if love is wild, babe I want to know if love is real.” Then: “Oh, can you show me.”

With love, we can all make our way. Together. Through fields where sunlight streams, as Springsteen sings in “Land of Hope and Dreams,” a song that dates to 1999 and was re-worked in 2012.

In this song, everyone is welcome to get on the train: saints, sinners, losers, winners, whores, gamblers, lost souls, the broken-hearted, thieves, sweet souls departed, fools and kings alike. Everyone. Just get on board. You don’t need no ticket.

On this train, dreams will not be thwarted. Faith will be rewarded. And, people, bells of freedom. they will ring.

More of that, please.

From and on behalf of each and every one of us.

The incredible Aries Merritt, and more

A dozen musings on track and field, on the 2024 Summer Games bid race and more:

1. At a news conference Friday in Eugene, Oregon, before Saturday’s line-up of events at the 42nd annual Prefontaine Classic, the question went out to Aries Merritt, the 2012 London men’s 110-meter hurdles champion who is also the world record-holder, 12.8 seconds, in the event: on a scale of one to 10, where did he fall?

Heading toward the U.S. Trials in a month and, presumably, beyond to the Rio 2016 Summer Games, Merritt has probably the most unbelievable, incredible, authentic story in track and field. He had a degenerative kidney condition. With almost no kidney function, he somehow won a bronze medal in the hurdles at the 2015 world championships. Thereafter, with his sister as the donor, he underwent a kidney transplant. It required not just one but two surgeries.

So — one to 10? “Ten,” he said. Which means that the hurdles, always one of the best events at the track, figures to be that much better. And, America and beyond — get ready, via NBC and every outlet out there, for the Aries Merritt story. He deserves every bit of good publicity he gets.

2. With all due respect to the sainted Steve Prefontaine — no snark or sarcasm intended, only a full measure of respect — a significant chunk of the problem with track and field in the United States is Steve Prefontaine.

Every sport needs heroes. Not just legends.

The elements of the Prefontaine story have been well-chronicled: the U.S. records at virtually every middle- and long distance event, the fourth in the 5k at the Munich 1972 Games, his life cut short in a car crash at 24.

The legend of Prefontaine, and appropriately, has had a longstanding hold on the U.S. track and field imagination.

But imagine if, say, baseball was stuck in the Roberto Clemente era. Or the NBA fixated on Reggie Lewis, Len Bias, Malik Sealy or, for that matter, Drazen Petrovic. Or the NFL on Junior Seau and others.

One of the major challenges with track and field now is that there is no 2016 version of larger-than-life Prefontaine. No one is that guy (or that woman). Ashton Eaton could be and maybe should be. But who else? Merritt? It's anyone's guess.

Most Americans, asked to name a track and field star, will answer: Carl Lewis.

It has been roughly 20 years since Lewis made any noise on the track itself, more than 40 since Prefontaine was alive. Meanwhile, fourth-graders all around the 50 states can readily debate (pick one) Peyton Manning or Tom Brady, whether Derek Jeter was the best Yankee ever, whether they would start an NBA team with (pick one) LeBron James or Steph Curry.

Every sport, to repeat, needs heroes. Not just legends.

3. Earlier this year, the former 800-meter world champion Caster Semenya made even hardened track geeks go, whoa. She raced, and won, three events — on the same day — at the South African national championships, the women’s 400 (personal-best 50.74), 800 (1:58.45) and 1500 (4:10.93, outside Olympic qualifying time).

So much for the theory — oft-advanced by track freaks who never bother to, say, watch swimming — that a world-class athlete can’t race, and win, multiple events on the same day.

From start to finish, Semenya ran the three races in about four hours.

She went 1:58.26 to win the Doha Diamond League meet in early May, winning by nearly an entire second.

On Sunday, and she wasn’t even really going all out, Semenya ran 1:56.64 for the win at the first IAAF Diamond League meet in Africa, in Rabat, Morocco. She won by more than a full second.

For comparison: on Friday night, on Day One of the 2016 Prefontaine Classic at historic Hayward Field, American Alysia Montaño-Johnson won the women's 800 in 2:00.78.

Semenya doesn’t deserve to do anything but get to run, and run as fast as possible. At the 2009 world championships in Berlin, she ran away with the 800, in a crazy-fast 1:55.45. Then it was disclosed that she had elevated testosterone levels. The gender testing — and, more, the shaming — that she endured thereafter proved unconscionable.

The rules are the rules. The rules say she can run in women’s events.

The real question is: what should be the rules?

Because it’s perhaps not that difficult to explain why Semenya is — after silvers in the 800 at the 2011 worlds and 2012 Olympics and then injuries and subpar performances since — running so fast again now.

It’s all about testosterone levels.

Because of Semenya, track and field’s international governing body, the International Assn. of Athletics Federations, as well as the International Olympic Committee, put in place a new policy: you could run in women’s events if your testosterone levels fell under a threshold of 10 nanomoles (that’s what it’s called) per liter. In scientific jargon: 10 nmo/L.

Context: as the South African scientist and writer Ross Tucker points out in a brilliant Q&A on what is called “hyperandrogenism” with the activist Joanna Harper, 99 percent of female athletes registered testosterone levels below 3.08 nmo/L.

From the science department, part I: “hyper” is science talk for what in ordinary speech might be described as “way, way more.” The primary and probably most well-known “androgen” is testosterone.

Part II, simple math: the upper limit of 10 is more than three times higher than for 99 in 100 women.

Last year, in a decision that pleased human rights advocates but left knowledgable track observers puzzled (to say the least), sport’s top court, the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, ruling in the case of sprinter Dutee Chand from India, said the IAAF (and IOC) could no longer enforce the testosterone limit.

In real life, and particularly as we look toward Rio, this means what?

The IAAF and IOC are trying to come up with a new policy.

In the meantime, Semenya, “plus a few others,” as Tucker writes, “have no restriction.” The erasure of the limit has “utterly transformed Semenya from an athlete who was struggling to run 2:01 to someone who is tactically running 1:56," Tucker goes on to say, adding, "My impression, having seen her live and now in the Diamond League, is that she could run 1:52, and if she wanted to, would run a low 48-second 400 meters and win that gold in Rio. too.”

He also writes that Semenya is “the unfortunate face of what is going to be a massive controversy in Rio” — my words here, not his, about who is a “female” and gets to run in “women’s” events. He writes, "It won’t be any consolation to Semenya, [that] the media, frankly, have no idea how to deal with this – nobody wants it to be about the athlete, and it certainly is not her fault.  However, it is a debate we must have, and I want to try to have it from the biological, sporting perspective, and steer clear of the minority bullying that so often punctuates these matters.”

Tucker is right. The debate — calm voices only, please — needs to be held, and in short order.

4. UCLA, per a report first from ESPN, landed the biggest college sports apparel deal ever, with Under Armour. Terms: 15 years, beginning in July 2017. The deal is believed to be worth $280 million.

Biggest-ever is likely to be relative, depending on what comes next.

Because, in recent months:

Michigan, 11 years (option to extend to 15), Nike, $169 million,

Texas, 15 years, Nike $250 million.

Ohio State, 15 years, Nike, $252 million.

Boosters of these schools, and others, typically tend to react with glee at these sorts of numbers.

Rhetorical question, part I: why, when USA Track & Field chief executive officer Max Siegel scores a $500 million, 23-year deal with Nike, do some number of track fans bemoan Nike’s influence as a death star of sorts and claim the federation is verging on stupidity if not recklessness?

Rhetorical question, part II: how is it that dismissive claims about the USATF/Nike deal become gospel among the disaffected when track athletes actually get paid to run for a living but college athletes, as UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen noted in a Tweet that quickly got deleted, don’t — and likely won’t —get to see a dime of any of those millions?

Just a thought here: maybe Siegel was, you know, ahead of the power curve.

5. More on USATF, now on the dismissal this week per 11-1 vote of the federation’s board of directors of the Youth Executive Committee and its chairman, Lionel Leach:

Many, many things could be said here about Leach and the conduct that led to this action.

For now, this will suffice:

This is a movie whose ending we can all know, and now.

Why?

Because it’s a re-run.

What’s at issue, at the core, is a power struggle between the volunteers and professional staff.

Here’s news: the professional staff is going to win. As it should.

It used to be that the U.S. Olympic Committee found itself consumed by precisely this sort of petty, personalized politics. That changed when governance reforms became real; when the board empowered the chief executive to run the show; and when the chief executive proved professional and hugely competent (USOC: Scott Blackmun, USATF: Siegel).

It's a fact that USATF has a long and contentious history. But this is a fact, too: Siegel's first four years have shown dramatic, and consequential, improvement for the federation, and the sport.

6. Moving along, to an international sports federation president who also gets it, even if the IOC often doesn't want to admit so: Marius Vizer, president of the International Judo Federation.

Vizer, in advance of the start Friday of a major IJF event in Guadalajara, Mexico, spent about two hours doing a live Q&A on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/MariusVizer/status/736270089708703744

Imagine: actually doing exactly what the IOC says it wants to do, to reach out to young people in those ways, like Twitter, by which young people connect with each other.

Far too many federation presidents might have something resembling a panic attack at the thought of entertaining questions about whatever from whoever. Vizer, who has never had anything to hide and has consistently been a forceful voice for accountability and change (to the IOC's chagrin), made it plain: bring it on.

Indeed, Vizer ended by saying more such Q&A's would be forthcoming.

https://twitter.com/MariusVizer/status/736291453161246722

7. Switching to 2024 bid news:

If you might be tempted to look past those potentially significant developments related to the allegations of Russian doping — first, a potential U.S. Justice Department inquiry and, second, U.S. Anti-Doping Agency chief Travis Tygart’s bombshell of an op-ed in the New York Times — it was otherwise a good week for the LA24 bid committee, at least for those things it could and can control.

Los Angeles, behind a bid headed by Casey Wasserman, who is also in charge of LA24, won the right to stage the 2021 Super Bowl.

Plus, a rail line from downtown to Santa Monica opened, to real excitement and big crowds. Roll that around in your head: LA. Rail. It’s real. Really.

8. Still a long way to go in the 2024 race, which the IOC will decide by secret ballot in September 2017 at a meeting in Lima, Peru. Three others are in the race: Paris, Rome, Budapest.

It’s a proven that what wins Olympic elections are, first, relationships, and two, telling a story that will move IOC members emotionally.

Right now, only two of the four are telling a real story: Los Angeles. And Budapest.

9. Turning to the 2020 Summer Games campaign, won by Tokyo:

The Japanese Olympic Committee announces a three-person investigation of allegations of bribery. This from the same place that brought you the burning of the Nagano 1998 books so as to avoid embarrassing the IOC.

Let’s all wish for really good luck in getting a genuine answer.

Why in the world would you need to send $2 million to Ian Tan Hong Han, a consultant based in Singapore, who is close friends with Papa Massata Diack, son of Lamine Diack, the then-president of the IAAF, when virtually no one in the Singapore international sports community knew of Han or his firm, Black Tidings?

Black Tidings had precisely what know-how to provide such high-level consultancy services?

More: those who were there for the Singapore 2010 Youth Games know there had to be external help when Singapore was bidding for YOG. Curious.

10. Russia uses sports as an instrument of what’s called “soft power,” meaning president Vladimir Putin has sought to use sports to project a Russian image of strength, not only abroad but, crucially, within Russia itself.

The United States, which under President Obama has clashed with the Kremlin over issues ranging from the disclosures of the activist Edward Snowden to the composition of the formal U.S. delegation to the Sochi 2014 Winter Games, has if not unparalleled then at least significant resource available to its spy agencies.

How is it that Sochi 2014 lab director Gregoriy Rodchenkov could flee Russia and end up so quickly in the United States? No one in the American spy apparatus would want to embarrass the Russians, would they?

Again: just curious.

11. What a surprise! The London 2012 doping re-test positives became public on a Friday!

The numbers: 23 athletes from five sports and six countries, based on 265 re-tests

More numbers, 32 doping cases from London 2012, 57 for Beijing 2008. Previous high, according to IOC figures: 26, Athens 2004.

To reiterate a central point: you have to be frighteningly stupid to get caught doping at the Olympic Games themselves.

It’s one thing to be caught in no-notice, out-of-competition testing. But at the Games?

You know there are going to be drug tests. You know the samples are going to be kept in the freezer for (at least) 10 years to allow for advances in testing.

It has been said many times but is still worth repeating: failing a drug test at the Olympics is like failing an IQ test.

Stupid.

12. If you’re thinking of going to Rio, don’t. Sorry to say so but — don’t. Watch on TV.

The pictures will be beautiful and the only danger in overloading on TV is breathing in that funky orange-red Doritos powder.

In Brazil, meanwhile:

The case of the Spanish sailors getting held-up at gunpoint, lucky to escape with their lives, underscores the No. 1 challenge ahead of these Games. More than dirty water, or maybe even Zika, or presidential politics, or corruption scandals. More than anything. To compete, or to be at, the Games in Rio, you have to deal with life in Rio as it is. Maybe — maybe even probably — it will be fine. But one wrong misstep, even with no fault, and you might well find yourselves in a scene evoking Tom Wolfe’s 1987 masterpiece, “Bonfire of the Vanities.”

Who wants that? Be a master of your TV universe.

Feds to international sports movement: drop dead

The U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday flipped a big, fat middle finger to the international sports movement. On what grounds? And to achieve, exactly, what?

Did anyone at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Brooklyn stop for even a second to think about the consequence — to the Los Angeles 2024 Summer Games bid, to the possibility of an American World Cup men's soccer tourney bid for 2026, to the interests of U.S. athletes everywhere — in opening a criminal investigation into allegations of state-sponsored Russian doping?

It is very, very difficult to make even — a little law talk here — a scintilla of sense from what, at first impression, seems like nothing so much as an outrageous, politically driven abuse of prosecutorial and law enforcement discretion.

In the United States, the law does not criminalize sports doping.

Italy, just to pick one — sure. But not the United States.

Yet here come the feds, reportedly launching a criminal investigation into sports doping. By athletes who are not Americans. What?

Indeed, as the New York Times first reported, the Department of Justice, through that Brooklyn prosecutor’s office, is “scrutinizing Russian government officials, athletes, coaches, anti-doping authorities and anyone who might have benefitted unfairly from a doping regime.”

It said the investigation “originated” with the FBI.

Because there isn’t a specific doping-related statute in U.S. law, federal prosecutors are apparently eyeing fraud and conspiracy charges, the Times reported.

This is, at best, legal gymnastics.

Moreover:

Imagine if the Russians, or the Chinese, or the French, pick anyone anywhere, decided to go after Americans: accusing U.S. athletes or their entourage or even American government officials of a crime under that particular nation's laws, basing the whole thing on allegations of sports-related doping.

What would the reaction be?

How is this any different?

The United States is not the world’s police officer nor, hardly, its prosecutor, judge and jury.

Who in the confines of some office in Brooklyn thought otherwise would serve any sort of American interest in our complicated, nuanced world?

News of the action from that U.S. Attorney’s office came as the International Olympic Committee announced Tuesday that re-tests of samples from the 2008 Beijing Games had turned up 31 positives, IOC president Thomas Bach calling it a “powerful strike against the cheats.”

Backing up for a moment:

You have to be a complete idiot to get caught doping at the Olympic Games. Everyone knows the authorities are going to be testing. And that samples get saved for years.

So there are two options here:

One, officials finally managed to get, say, some top-level Jamaicans or Kenyans. That would be a “powerful strike.”

Two, and more likely, if this cast of 31 was a Kevin Spacey movie, it would be the usual suspects. There are roughly 10,000 athletes at a Summer Games. Catching 31 means roughly 0.3 percent. Whoo.

Let’s be clear:

In this moment, the IOC is facing a potentially unprecedented onslaught of challenges: everything from Russian doping to the seemingly chaotic preparations for the Rio Games, from allegations of potential bribery involving Tokyo’s win for 2020 to the sudden resignation of Yang Ho Cho, the one guy in South Korea who had the 2018 Winter Games ship — finally — moving in the right direction.

IOC leadership has a bully pulpit. But no. It has been notably quiet when it could and should be aggressive in pursuit of resolution to all these challenges.

But that does not mean it is up to the United States to decide unilaterally that it is an American burden, taken on willingly, to address or fix even one of these problems.

The notion of American exceptionalism — that we are different because we are us — plays well domestically.

Internationally, not so much. Indeed, in the Olympic scene, you hear time and again that the rest of the world wants way, way less American exceptionalism. To that point, senior U.S. Olympic Committee leadership has spent the past six years preaching humility, asserting that the U.S. is just one of more than 200 nations in a global movement.

Apparently that message didn’t reach Brooklyn.

In retrospect, maybe it all makes so much more sense now, the failure of that New York bid for the Summer 2012 Games. All this dropping dead.

An American civics refresher: there are 94 U.S. attorney’s offices, one for each federal district. Federal prosecutors make for one of the most powerful arms of the entire United States government.

In Brooklyn, they implausibly decided the course of action ought to be more American exceptionalism.

Like, way more. Take that, everyone. Enjoy our investigation along with your freedom fries and newly relabeled “America” beer (née Budweiser).

A little more American civics background: the planning and execution of an American bid for a mega-event such as the Games or the World Cup involves different entities that are all part of the same branch of government, the executive: the FBI and DOJ, State, Treasury and more.

The head of the executive branch is the president himself.

President Obama has been, in many regards, an extraordinary executive. If the time in which we live is not always kind to Mr. Obama, history likely will be. At the same time, he might be the worst sports president since 1776. Ever since the day in October 2009 that Chicago got the boot for the 2016 Summer Games, won by Rio, the Obama Administration’s connection with international sports has been rich with one conflict after another.

And particularly with Russia.

It was just two-plus years ago, for instance, that the president opted in advance of the Sochi Games to make a political statement regarding Russia’s anti-gay laws by naming a U.S. delegation that was to be headed by the tennis star Billie Jean King and two other openly gay athletes. (King ultimately made it to the closing ceremony; she was unable to attend the opening ceremony because of her mother’s death.)

In nearly three years as IOC president, Bach has met with more than 100 heads of state. Obama? No, and not even last October, when a good chunk of the Olympic movement’s senior leadership descended on Washington, D.C., for the meeting of the Assn. of National Olympic Committees.

At that ANOC meeting, not one ranking Obama Administration official showed up — until the fourth day. Then came a surprise appearance from Vice President Joe Biden, the protocol equivalent of a drive-by.

During his brief stay on stage, all of seven minutes, the vice president called the Olympics the “single unifying principle in the world.”

Pretty hard to mesh that with an investigation out of Brooklyn into Russian dopers.

Indeed, there’s so much wrong with the idea that American federal prosecutors are investigating the possibility of laying criminal charges in this kind of matter that it is difficult to even know where to begin.

But here we go:

— There’s no law on point.

— On what theory does the United States claim virtually unlimited, worldwide jurisdiction?

It is incredibly unclear what nexus the United States might assert here to find jurisdiction. The banking system, as in the FIFA matter? That has always been tenuous.

— Let’s play hypothetical for just a moment. Assume the case yields indictments. How in the world are you going to get defendants into the United States, particularly if they’re in Russia? Get serious.

— The Times reported that the whistleblower in another story it broke a few days ago, about alleged misconduct at the Sochi 2014 lab, the director Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, is “among the people under scrutiny by the United States government.”

Let’s see: we want to encourage whistle-blowers to step up and report what they know. Rodchenkov, fleeing to the United States, does just that — only to become a focus of potential criminal inquiry by the feds?

It’s not hard to imagine this hypothetical: Rodchenkov applies for asylum. Such an application hinges on his “cooperation” with the DOJ, the feds in Brooklyn perhaps eager to squeeze him to be a key witness against others.

Rodchenkov already has a lawyer, the Times reported. And he said, “I have no choice. I am between two flames,” meaning the United States and Russian governments.

Also, this: Rodchenkov is living in Los Angeles. That is a long way from Brooklyn.

— Every case brought by federal prosecutors operates on two tracks: it plays out in court and, as well, in the court of public opinion. The resource of the FBI, DOJ and each U.S. Attorney is indeed significant but even that resource is finite. That means each and every prosecution has to be brought to prove a point. In essence, every single prosecution is distinguished, at some level, by notions of politics. This may not be the most popular point of view but it is indisputably true.

The Brooklyn office is the same office that is central to the FIFA case. That matter is a reach, jurisdictionally and otherwise.

This? Way more so.

And yet this is what law enforcement chooses to investigate? When surely the Eastern District of New York has more pressing issues? Like, say, shootings? Racially tinged housing issues? Antitrust matters? The list could go on and on.

— Why do U.S. taxpayers care for even a second if Russians are doping? What taxpayer interest might prosecutors be serving or protecting by going after sports dopers? None. Obviously. Otherwise Congress would have enacted a law saying something about the matter. That’s the way the American system works.

— Further:

Let’s say an American finished one position lower in x number of sports at the Games because of proven Russian doping. Would the outcome of a criminal case result in y number more medals for the United States? Or Italy? France? Mongolia? Wherever?

Take as just one of but many such examples the Olympic women’s 20-kilometer walk.

Olga Kaniskina of Russia won the event in Beijing in 2008 and crossed the line second in London in 2012. In March of this year, the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled Kaniskina ineligible from August 2009 until October 2012 because of anomalies in what’s called her “biological passport,” a reading of blood markers. Thus at issue: the London silver. Third place? Qieyang Shenjie of China. Fourth? Liu Hong, China. The top American finisher? Maria Michta, 29th.

The women’s 3k steeplechase from London? The first-place finisher, Yulia Zaripova of Russia, is expected to be DQ’d for doping. Second? Habib Ghribi of Tunisia. Third? Sofia Assefa, Ethiopia. Fourth? Micah Chemos Cheywa of Kenya. The top American? Emma Coburn, ninth.

London women’s discus: Russian silver medalist Darya Pishchalnikova tests positive for a steroid. Third place? Li Yanfeng of China. Fourth? Yarelys Barrios of Cuba. The best American? Stephanie Brown Trafton, the 2008 gold medalist, in eighth.

And so on.

— Is it the DOJ’s responsibility to protect Americans from watching bad sports? Hardly.

Joke: if so, maybe it should focus on the MLS.

— The DOJ has a proven record of achieving very little, if anything, after spending considerable taxpayer dollars when it comes to high-profile sports-related corruption or doping-related prosecutions.

The two figures at the center of Salt Lake City’s tainted bid for the 2002 Winter Games, Tom Welch and Dave Johnson? The case — 15 counts against each — was dropped, a federal judge saying it offended his “sense of justice,” adding, “Enough is enough.”

Roger Clemens? Acquitted of charges he obstructed and lied to Congress in denying he used performance-enhancing drugs.

Barry Bonds? Free as a big-headed bird after nearly 10 years of facing prosecution.

Then there’s the peculiar matter involving Lance Armstrong. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles spent nearly two years investigating allegations that Armstrong and his cycling teammates committed a variety of potential crimes via doping. A grand jury had even been convened. Then, in February 2012, the case mysteriously just — stopped. Over and done. No more.

For years, Armstrong denied doping. He said at the time the criminal case was dropped that he was “gratified,” adding, “It is the right decision and I commend them for reaching it.”

So strange, still. Eight months later, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released more than 1,000 pages of evidence against Armstrong. Three months after that, there was Armstrong with Oprah Winfrey, purportedly confessing all.

The addendum: the chief prosecutor of the LA office at the time, then-U.S. Attorney André Birotte Jr., was confirmed in July 2014 as a federal judge. That's a lifetime job.

For those keeping score: the former chief prosecutor in the Brooklyn office, Loretta Lynch, is now attorney general of the United States.

Remember: politics attends virtually everything involving the U.S. attorney’s office, wherever, wherever and however.

— Finally, when did it become a key DOJ agenda item to make U.S. foreign policy?

The idea that federal prosecutors could be so narrow-minded as to not take into account the LA24 bid, or American soccer ambitions for 2026, seems like a classic case of one executive branch hand (prosecutors) not knowing what the waggling fingers on the other hand might be up to.

Or, more probably, not caring.

Simply put: this is likely to pose a huge challenge for the USOC, the LA24 committee and others in the sports movement.

The FIFA thing was already difficult enough to try to explain amid the complicated matrix that underpins any U.S. sports bid.

Beyond which, any number of IOC members are known post-9/11 to be wary of travel to the United States. No one from another country likes being treated like a potential terrorist upon arrival. Especially IOC members.

Any number of members are also cautious, if not more, when it comes to what they perceive as a Wild West-type American gun culture. Among their questions: is it really safe to go to a college campus when there are open-carry laws? What about an Olympics with so many people carrying so many guns?

Now this from Brooklyn, and what is sure to be the follow-on assertion by any number of members that they must fret about every credit-card receipt if any financial transaction credibly can provide a tie to the U.S. legal system.

If the easy answer to that is, hey, IOC members, don’t do anything wrong — sure.

The simple rejoinder: it’s the cities that have proven the much-larger problem in IOC bidding, not the members per se.

At any rate, that doesn’t answer the salient question, which is: in September, 2017, with Paris, Rome and Budapest in the field along with Los Angeles, which city is going to get a majority of IOC votes?

As a policy matter, securing an Olympic Games is a way better proposition than going after some Russians. Politically, economically, culturally and in virtually every other way: winning a Games is a better bet.

At one point, you know, even President Obama thought so. He put his prestige on the line for Chicago, his hometown. Nothing has been quite the same since.

Trump: the peril and limit of the 'moron' vote

In the spirit of Chris Rock at the Oscars on Sunday night, let’s get right to it, the elephant in the room. In this case, the room is decorated with the five Olympic rings and the elephant — ever-so-figuratively, given that he is running for the Republican presidential nomination — is Mr. Donald Trump. Straight talk: if Mr. Trump were to win the general presidential election in November, it’s difficult to draw up a scenario in which that would play well for Los Angeles’ bid for the 2024 Summer Games.

In the 2024 Olympic campaign, Los Angeles would seem, right now, to have a lot going for it. LA has all the ready advantage of being the center of all that is SoCal, plus the huge boost of not having to build hardly anything to get ready for a Games, plus the full attention of the International Olympic Committee's focus on technology and innovation -- California being home to Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, Snapchat, Disney and more. Look, if California were a nation, it would boast the world's eighth-largest GDP. And, of course, ridiculously great weather.

All IOC elections are unpredictable. Just the same, LA stands at least a reasonable chance of convincing the IOC to bring the Summer Games back to the United States for the first time since 1996 and Atlanta.

And then there's Mr. Trump.

It is the case that, over the years, Mr. Trump has been linked with elements of the Olympic scene, in particular New York’s bid for the 2012 Games. At the same time, his political rhetoric, and in particular over the past several months, has — this is being gracious — hardly been in keeping with the Olympic values.

The Olympic movement is about building bridges between people. Mr. Trump talks about walls.

At its best, the Olympic movement promotes dialogue, understanding and a more peaceful world. On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump is often about — again, being generous — intolerance.

Here is a prediction:

By September 2017, when the IOC picks its 2024 winner, Hillary Clinton will have been the U.S. president for about eight months. Mrs. Clinton has long shown significant support for the Olympics — as First Lady through the 1990s and then, in 2005, via in-person support as New York senator at the IOC vote at which London won out for 2012. Significantly, Mrs. Clinton has longstanding ties with LA24 bid leader Casey Wasserman and mayor Eric Garcetti.

Los Angeles is vying with three other cities for the 2024 Games: Paris, Rome and Budapest.

Be assured that Mr. Trump is already the subject of much discussion in Olympic circles. Bet that his name comes up many times over at the three-day IOC’s policy-making executive board meeting starting Tuesday in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Bet, too, that Mr. Trump’s political ascent puts the U.S. Olympic Committee and the LA24 people in a delicate position. On the one hand, it’s presidential politics — what is the USOC or LA24 to do? (Answer to rhetorical question: nothing.) On the other, it’s American politics, which carries a disproportionate weight, the U.S. president nominally being leader of the free world, and all that.

Keep in mind, always, that the IOC is European-dominated. Thanks to a round-up published Monday in the New York Times, we can be perfectly clear that Mr. Trump "elicits shock and biting satire" in any number of European nations, including Germany (Der Spiegel front cover, “Madness: America’s agitator”), Britain (580,000 sign petition seeking to ban him from the country), France (Liberation: “Trump, From Nightmare to Reality”) and Spain (letter from imaginary 16th-century king to Trump advising him to “consider bringing back the Inquisition”).

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 87-year-old founder of the far-right French National Front, who as recently as last year referred to the Holocaust as a “detail” in the history of World War II, had this to say Saturday on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/lepenjm/status/703625793814003712

Translation: “If I were American, I would vote for Donald Trump … but may God protect him!”

Mr. Trump has a “budding bromance” with Russian president Vladimir Putin, according to that same article in the Times, citing — among others — favorable comments on RT, the Kremlin-funded broadcaster.

For those who might be unfamiliar, Mr. Putin is by any measure one of the most important figures in the Olympic and international sports scene. That’s what happens when 1. you are the president of Russia, 2. you spearhead the spending of a reported $51 billion to organize the 2014 Winter Games and 3. you are in line to stage the 2018 soccer World Cup.

It’s no secret President Obama is not a significant personality in the Olympic world. After campaigning in person in 2009 at the IOC vote in Copenhagen at which Chicago, the president’s home town, went out first, Rio ultimately prevailing, the president seemingly has had enough of the IOC. Recall the politically charged delegation President Obama sought to send to Sochi? Featuring, among others, Billie Jean King (who ultimately made the closing ceremonies)?

Maybe that helps explain the Russian love for Trump. Then again, maybe the Kremlin ought to take a second look at Mr. Trump’s Facebook account. Here, from just after those Sochi Games, and does this express the foundational Olympic values — friendship, excellence, respect — or what?

Who knows, of course, what a Trump presidency — perish the thought — might really mean for the Olympics? Mr. Trump, for those keeping track of his Olympic connections, ran with the Olympic torch in New York on June 19, 2004.

As part of the New York bid, Mr. Trump appeared in a 2002 film that played at least a small role in the USOC decision to pick New York — over San Francisco — as the 2012 U.S. entrant. Later, as the New York campaign rolled along, he was photographed signing a balance beam.

He also opted last summer on Twitter to weigh in on Boston’s failed 2024 effort:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/625816370849181696

Heading into the Super Tuesday series of primary elections, Mr. Trump may well be in position to win the Republican nomination.

But the odds of him winning the general election are about as likely as that 9/11 tale he tells in which “thousands and thousands of people” — in New Jersey, with a “heavy Arab population” — “were cheering as that building,” referring to the World Trade Center tower, “was coming down.” That never happened.

About as likely as his plan for a wall to go up between Mexico and the United States, and Mexico paying for it — as if, former Mexican president Vicente Fox saying, “I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall,” and offering this about Trump, among other things, “I mean, he reminds me of Hitler.”

Speaking of references to fascists, here is Trump himself favorably retweeting a post — from, as it turned out, a parody account — that included a quote widely attributed to Mussolini.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/703900742961270784

In the end, the odds of Mr. Trump winning are about as likely as the real-ness of another urban legend he has related, about Muslim extremists being killed by a World War I-era general with bullets that had been dipped in pig’s blood. That never happened.

There are many, many reasons not to vote for Mr. Trump. On the campaign trail, he has revealed himself to be a racist, a bully, a misogynist, a serial liar, someone who throws insults at the handicapped and the Pope and decries the press — and much, much more.

None of this seems to have made a significant imprint in certain precincts of the American electorate, where anger and discontent are manifest.

If you went to public high school — guilty — you come to understand, maybe even just by looking around each morning in home room, the delight in the American system: when you turn 18, and if you register, you get to vote. As the former LA Times columnist T.J. Simers used to love to say, these people live among you.

Even so, for presidential voting purposes, these are the real questions: how many morons are out there, and how many of those morons will actually vote?

The Onion, the satirical news site, put it this way in a story posted Tuesday, a report on a made-up 36-year-old delivery driver from Youngstown, Ohio: " 'I'm Trump All the Way,' Says Man Who Will Die from Mishandling Fireworks Months Before Election."

As Bill James, the father of sabermetrics, the empirical analysis of baseball, put it in a recent blog post, referring to Trump’s status as reality-TV star for the last 20 years and expertise at attracting media attention:

“Trump gets a grossly disproportionate share of the attention, and thus a disproportion share of the idiot vote.”

James also wrote:

“I don’t think that Trump can win, frankly, because I don’t think there are enough morons to elect him. A certain percentage of the American public is just morons; that’s the way it is.”

During this primary season, as James makes clear, the other Republican candidates are playing right into Trump’s hands. What Trump is doing is winning a plurality of a Republican electorate divided multiple ways — that is, at least until after Tuesday, there are still five guys in the race, one of whom, Dr. Ben Carson, has a less-than-zero chance of winning.

This fractionality is essential to understanding what’s going on, as James outlines:

“When you divide the public in two and then divide the voters in one of those halves among five candidates or more, a candidate can win by dominating the moron vote because it only takes about one-seventh of the total population to take the ‘lead’ under those circumstances. But when you’re talking about needing 51 percent of the whole population, rather than needing 30 percent of half of the population, you run out of morons. I hope we will; I hope Trump will lose because I hope that he runs out of morons to vote for him.”

President Obama may not be a big hit in the Olympic world, but he — and President Reagan, too — understood better than almost anyone in the past several decades what a presidential election is about.

It’s not fear, Mr. Trump’s calling card.

It’s hope.

That is the essence of the Olympic spirit, too, and it’s why the election this season of Mrs. Clinton — for all her debate-worthy flaws — is so important.

"Despite what you hear, we don’t need to make America great again — America hasn’t stopped being great. But we do need to make America whole again," Mrs. Clinton said Saturday in South Carolina, mocking Trump's campaign slogan, as the website The Hill reported.

"Instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers. We need to show, by everything we do, that we really are in this together.”

Big decision but not difficult -- kill Boston 2024

The U.S. Olympic Committee has a big decision on its hands at the end of the month: whether to kill off the Boston 2024 bid.

Big, yes. But not difficult. It’s obvious, made more so by an informal survey of key International Olympic Committee members a few days ago in Lausanne, Switzerland, who could not have made it more plain: do the right thing, they said in straightforward, indeed blunt, language, and put this Boston 2024 bid out of its, and everyone’s, misery.

Time is of the essence.

“Move,” said one senior IOC member, often a confidante of IOC president Thomas Bach’s, speaking — like the other members quoted here — on condition of anonymity. This member added, referring to the Boston bid team, “They had their opportunity. They fucked it around.”

“Los Angeles is better than Boston,” said another senior member. “The USA has to change its image.”

Said another, making an imaginary trigger with index finger and thumb, “The sooner the better. It has to be now.”

Get the picture?

Here is the deal, again as candidly as possible.

There is one reason, and one reason only, for the United States to enter the 2024 bid race: to win.

It’s a $75 million gamble, maybe more, in this kind of race. For that kind of money, which in the United States means private investment, that can yield only one satisfactory result:

Winning.

That, after the October 2009 first-round exit that Chicago 2016 suffered, even with President Obama himself lobbying in person at the IOC session in Copenhagen for his hometown, is what the USOC took to heart.

That is why the USOC did not run for 2020.

All conversations now about how an Olympic bid process can be a great learning process, maybe even a swell stimulus, can be lovely exercises for urban-planning seminars.

But winning is way, way, way better.

Ask London. Or Paris. Which of the two has been on the upswing since that 2005 vote for 2012?

Or New York. Do you really think New York would have preferred to have lost, or won, that 2012 race?

The peril and promise of an American bid

Last week, the IOC’s policy-making executive board met in Lausanne. After a few days, they were joined by almost all the IOC members for briefings related to the  2022 Winter Games race.

The only thing predictable about an IOC election is its unpredictability. That said, there is clearly a feeling within the most influential IOC circles that the time could be right for the Americans.

This despite the FIFA indictments brought by the U.S. Department of Justice — which, truth be told, have caused U.S. interests and in particular the USOC real damage in sports politics, the measure of which remains to be calculated.

The challenges any American bid faces ought not to be understated. One member, reflecting on the imminent signing of a Texas law allowing the open carrying of handguns in public and of concealed handguns on state university campuses — the governor would sign it last weekend — said that measure alone ought to spell the end of the Boston bid. Or, for that matter, Los Angeles, if it came to that.

Who, the member asked, could reliably trust the safety of one’s university-age children in a country with such a law?

For Americans, who understand the differences, geographical and cultural, between Texas and the two coasts, such a rhetorical question might seem — unusual. This, though, is the way it is.

For all that, it is the case that Larry Probst, who is the USOC chairman, and Scott Blackmun, the USOC chief executive, have spent since January 2010 repairing relationships and building international goodwill, in particular among the IOC’s — to use a phrase — thought leaders.

Within the IOC, a good many people have taken notice.

What they can’t now understand is why Probst and Blackmun didn’t do in January, when the USOC seemingly made its 2024 choice, what is expected in Olympic circles — tell the USOC board that Los Angeles was the right choice, and get on with it.

Democracy can be a good thing. But not necessarily in a board setting — at least an Olympic-style board.

In this instance, as was related time and again in Lausanne, Probst and Blackmun should have done what Bach does in the IOC: just do it. The IOC works better when the president is in charge. Same, it was related, for the USOC.

Without a doubt, Probst and Blackmun know full well what will win in Lausanne — or at least have a chance. It’s LA — for 2024 and, if it doesn’t work out, 2028.

One of the fundamental mistakes the U.S. makes is not running the same city, if it loses, again. The IOC likes it when they see cities keep trying — Pyeongchang, South Korea, bid twice before winning a third time for 2018.

It’s time now, it was said in Lausanne, for Probst and Blackmun to tell the USOC board what’s what  — to right the mistake that was made in January and, again, get on with it.

The idea of not bidding for 2024 is, of course, one option. But it’s a very poor option. Reading the tea leaves in Lausanne, it’s clear that not bidding for 2024 will — like the Chicago 2016 defeat — set the Americans back three to five to as many as 10 years in IOC circles.

Will the USOC likely encounter a dash of unfavorable publicity if it kills off Boston?

For sure.

For about a week. And that will be that.

Will Los Angeles be relegated for the next two years to a status as “second choice”?

Maybe. But probably not.

Why?

You know what they know how to do in Los Angeles?

Tell stories. In film and in our increasingly digital world.

You know what wins Olympic bids?

Story-telling. And humility. Which the USOC, the embodiment of the American medal machine, could use a dose of — if it manages this turn-around the right way, which actually could and should be super-easy.

Just come right out and say, we made a mistake.

For the sake of clarity:

San Francisco and Washington, the other two 2024 finalists, offered some upsides. But neither, to stress, emerged as a plausible IOC candidate. San Francisco, for all its beauty, can hardly get artificial turf put down in a local park; imagine trying to prepare for, and put on, 28 simultaneous world championships, which is what a Summer Games involves. DC, to many overseas, represents the seat of American imperialism; meanwhile, the very last thing the USOC needs is the oversight of 535 self-appointed mayors, meaning the various members of Congress, casting an eye on seven years of preparations.

So it was Boston or Los Angeles.

If you haven’t been to Los Angeles recently, if you’re stuck on a vision of LA as 1984 or 1992, and can only see it as traffic and been-there, you really need to think again.

This from, of all sources, the New York Times, just last month:

“Los Angeles is an incredible city and is in the center of a creative explosion right now,” Christopher Bailey, Burberry’s chief creative officer and chief executive, wrote [to the newspaper] in an email. “There is an amazing and inspiring mix of people from the worlds of film, technology, music, architecture, food and culture and now fashion, all doing such interesting things there.”

Boston has more than had its chance

The primary problem with Boston is not that the USOC didn’t do its due diligence. It’s that the USOC board chose to dismiss or ignore that diligence, and in particular the low approval numbers in the polls.

Now the figure stands at 39 percent. That is, in a word, abysmal.

The IOC wants 70 percent.

In LA, the poll numbers were in the high 70s.

When the poll number was 67 percent in Chicago, there was something approaching panic.

Now it’s 39 percent in Boston, and they seriously want to talk about keeping this thing going?

Be real.

So:

Enough, already, with comments such as these from current Boston 2024 spokesman Doug Rubin, who told the New York Times this week, with the committee rolling out new venue plans, “Give us a chance to make the case.”

No.

Boston has had, at the least, a full year to make its case. It was named one of the four USOC finalists in June 2014. Last Dec. 16, those four cities made presentations behind closed doors to the USOC. On Jan. 8, the board picked Boston.

Boston has had ample opportunity to make its case. To say now that it should get more time is, as this space has written before, not fair and not right to the other cities in the domestic campaign, and in particular to the other three finalists.

It’s particularly embarrassing, if not egregious, for Boston 2024 to have sold the USOC on one “concept” and then, six months later, be trotting out a whole new “plan.”

The first “idea” was a walkable, transit-oriented notion in which the city of Boston would be an “Olympic Park.”

This week came word that shooting, originally planned for Boston Harbor, will be 25 miles away, in Billerica. Beach volleyball was originally pitched as Boston’s equivalent of London’s Horse Garden Parade, an iconic, centrally located venue with history; on Wednesday, it was moved to a field in Quincy, just south of Boston. Sailing, it was announced earlier this month, would be moved from Boston Harbor to New Bedford, near Cape Cod.

Attention, Hertz!

We are all still waiting on word from Holyoke, in western Massachusetts, and the proposal from the mayor there to move snatch up volleyball.

What’s next? Is basketball going to go to from TD Garden, the home of the Boston Celtics, to Springfield, Massachusetts, two hours away, because it’s the birthplace of the game and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame?

All this is a ploy clearly designed to try to win votes for a November 2016 statewide referendum.

As if.

Do you call all these changes "interesting" or do words such as “fraud” start exploding in your head?

The original “concept” made such a big deal, meanwhile, out of involving so many colleges and universities in and around town.

Tennis had originally been planned for Harvard. Now it would be at a facility in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, with the university apparently distancing itself from the bid.

This from Associated Press, regarding the tennis venue: “They had initially been proposed for Harvard University in nearby Cambridge, Mass. but the Ivy League university, which had once been a prominent component of the city's bid, has been distancing itself from the efforts in recent days.”

When a big dog like Harvard starts laying down, what about others? You seriously expect to run an Olympics without the out-front support of a leading institution such as Harvard?

Again, be real.

Enough, already, with the leadership shuffles at Boston 2024. From all accounts, new bid leader Steve Pagliuca is a decent guy. But starting from scratch — with him a few weeks prior, at a separate meeting in Switzerland, making the rounds of the Olympic Museum in Lausanne and not knowing whether for voting purposes the museum officials are important or not — is not the way to win.

Enough with the Massachusetts Rocky Horror political picture show. Here, alone, is a stand-alone reason to kill Boston 2024:

Mayor Walsh tells WBZ re: Olympic bid:" I won't be signing any document that will have the City of Boston responsible for any overruns."

— Jon Keller (@kelleratlarge) June 11, 2015

Boston 2024 may be angling to make this more of a Commonwealth of Massachusetts deal -- maybe even beyond -- but contractually the IOC deals formally with a single entity, and that entity is a city. If Boston Mayor Marty Walsh isn’t willing to sign the host-city contract, that in and of itself is enough to kill the deal. Right now. Done.

Enough, too, with the contrast between the Olympic values — friendship, excellence and respect — and a man later identified as the mayor’s cousin, at one of the various community meetings this spring, calling a woman expressing opposition to Boston 2024 a “fucking piece of shit.”

Enough as well with Pollyanna-ish op-ed pieces like the one posted Wednesday on Huffington Post from Angela Ruggiero, the IOC (athlete commission) member who is also a USOC board member. It was outdated even as it went up, touting the athlete experience — the city as Olympic Park — when that very same day the beach volleyball-to-Quincy announcement was being made, following the shooting-to-Billerica and sailing-to-New Bedford switch-outs, with more almost certain to follow.

Come on.

Ruggiero, who like Probst was in Lausanne last week, surely has to know better. She has to know the prevailing mood among their fellow IOC members. If she doesn’t, she’s not talking to the right people — or, as someone who, as she acknowledged in her HuffPost piece, got her undergraduate and M.B.A. degrees in Boston, has a serious conflict of interest and ought to recuse herself from any June 30 vote.

Time is of the essence.

“Better faster than later,” an IOC member who is the president of one of the most important international federations said in Lausanne. “It’s an uphill battle.”

“If it’s inevitable,” said another IOC member, “it’s obvious it needs to be pulled immediately."

The consequences of the FIFA indictments

EUGENE, Oregon — You know who looks like geniuses right about now? Vin Lananna here at so-called TrackTown USA and Max Siegel, chief executive of USA Track & Field. They were two of the keys to bringing track and field’s world championships to Eugene in 2021. That might be the last hurrah.

In the aftermath of the FIFA indictments, it likely may be a generation or more before the United States sees a World Cup played here, women’s or men’s. And the U.S. Olympic Committee’s 2024 bid, now centered on Boston? The International Olympic Committee won’t vote on 2024 until 2017 but this Boston bid can now be presumed to be DOA.

U.S. and European mainstream news reports may be hailing the U.S. Justice Department’s decision to go after some of the sport’s heavyweights — the indictments, unsealed Wednesday, charge nine soccer officials and five marketing executives.

Sepp Blatter, the head of FIFA, was not charged. In a statement Thursday before the vote Friday in Zurich at which he is widely expected to be re-elected to a fifth, four-year term, he said, “We, or I, cannot monitor everyone all of the time. If people want to do wrong, they will also try to hide it. But it must also fall to me to be responsible for the reputation of our entire organization, and to find a way to fix things.

“We cannot allow the reputation of FIFA to be dragged through the mud any longer. It has to stop here and now.”

FIFA has ruled out a revote of the World Cup bids won by Russia for 2018 and Qatar for 2022.

Big picture:

This is a highly charged game of international politics and intrigue where what the U.S. Justice Department does or doesn’t do, or says or doesn’t say, is hardly the final word.

Indeed, it’s unclear how these indictments, or the prospect of further investigation or indictment, furthers any American criminal or international agenda.

The DOJ as world's self-appointed sheriff

Just to set out the fundamental premise and ask the elemental question:

The United States is hardly a major soccer nation. Who in the United States was harmed by alleged wrongdoing or misconduct involving FIFA?

Assuming extradition, and you can bet that some of these defendants can, and will, have access to some superior legal minds:

If the government of some country — say, for hypothetical purposes, South Africa — pays someone a “bribe,” is that actually a crime? If so, why?

What about the notion of sovereign immunity?

What about this: is it illegal to take money from a government?

Can’t the argument be made that this all rather smacks of politics and the generation of headlines — in particular for a brand-new attorney general, Loretta Lynch?

Come on: this went down at the FIFA Congress? That wasn’t on purpose?

Did anyone along the way — repeat, anyone — stop to consider or coordinate the multiple levels of U.S. policy internationally?

To be clear: not to say that FIFA might not be exceedingly worthy of investigation or inquiry.

To underscore: the amount of newsprint and digital pixelation that has been given over to allegations of wrongdoing or misconduct at FIFA over the years is monumental.

But who decided that the United States of America ought to be the self-appointed problem solver, to ride in like the sheriff in an old western, and right whatever wrongs might be wrong in this particular soccer movie? Like, why?

How’s that going for the United States in other areas of public policy — for instance, Iraq and Afghanistan?

We don’t have enough issues back home, the federal budget isn’t strained enough, and this is the priority? Baltimore is melting down, Ferguson, too, and the Justice Department is chasing soccer balls in Zurich?

If all this was the first step in a grand plot to take down Blatter, how long is that going to take? Long enough to play out through 2017, and the IOC process for voting for the 2024 Summer Games? Looking at that through an American prism -- if that's the case, is that a likely good thing for a U.S. Olympic bid?

How about this? You can bet — take it to the window in Vegas — that senior officials overseas with even the most fundamental understanding of the American system will make this connection, right or wrong, fair or not:

One, President Obama is known to have been exceedingly frustrated, or worse, after he made an in-person appeal in Copenhagen in 2009 at the IOC session on behalf of his own city, Chicago, and the members booted Chicago out in the first round of voting.

Two, President Obama is the head of the executive branch of the American system.

Three, the Justice Department is part of the executive branch.

Draw whatever conclusions you wish.

Again, it does not matter whether it is right or not, fair or unfair.

What matters in international sport

What matters in the nuanced world of high-level international sport and politics is perception and relationships.

Newspaper headlines can scream and blare and proclaim all they want.

Whatever.

So when, for instance, Sunil Gulati of the U.S. Soccer Federation says Thursday that he intends to instruct the American delegate to vote Friday for Blatter’s challenger, Jordan’s Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan, where — afterward, and for a long time — can that expect to leave U.S. Soccer?

Start naming your wildernesses here, because FIFA under Blatter has operated with what Ali has called a culture of “retribution.”

As the New York Times put it, blandly: “Anti-American sentiment is not unusual in international sports, and the involvement of the Department of Justice in Wednesday’s arrests will not help the United States’s image.”

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was — as usual — more forceful.

He called Wednesday’s arrests of top FIFA officials in Zurich “another blatant attempt by the United States to extend its jurisdiction to other states.”

And: “I have no doubt that this is obviously an attempt to prevent Mr. Blatter’s re-election to the post of FIFA president, which is a grave violation of the principles that international organizations function on.”

And: “Unfortunately, our American partners use these methods to achieve their selfish goals and persecute people illegally. I don’t rule out that this may be the same case with FIFA.”

So — if you are the USOC and you are weighing whether to keep up this charade of a Boston bid, with its dubiously low polling numbers and a plan that is not a plan, with leaders who were not even the leaders when the USOC picked it last January, now you’ve got Putin even more upset at the United States and Blatter, too.

Ah, you say — Blatter is 79 and by IOC rules he has to go off at 80.

But wait — under the new Agenda 2020 protocols, the IOC can grant waivers to five members to stay on past 80. So far, the IOC has awarded only one of the five, to the president of the skiing federation, Gian-Franco Kasper. That leaves four. Doesn’t it seem highly likely the president of almighty FIFA would get one of the remaining four?

As for Putin — it is always worth remembering, as this space points out time and again, that the very first call IOC president Thomas Bach received upon his election in Buenos Aires in 2013 was from Putin.

Russia has — for at least a few more months — four IOC members. Vitaly Smirnov is the dean of the members; he turned 80 in February. The chair of the 2022 evaluation commission is Russia’s Alexander Zhukov. Obviously, the 2014 Winter Games were in Russia, in Sochi.

Given the country’s prominence in the Olympic movement, it would hardly be surprising if, by 2017, there were again four Russian members.

Even at three, Russia holds considerable Olympic influence.

Keep in mind that London beat Paris by four votes, 54-50, for the 2012 Summer Games — which means, really, by a swing of two votes.

Blatter’s influence in the one-nation, one-vote FIFA system is in Asia, Africa and South America.

As for the Europeans, who will be supporting Ali on Friday, come 2024, there figure to be at least three — Hamburg, Rome and Paris — and maybe four — Budapest — European cities in the Summer Games race.

It’s in the IOC’s interest to have an American candidate, so be sure that the only thing you’ll hear from Lausanne, Switzerland, where the IOC is based, is how interesting and promising the American bid is, or could be.

Bottom line: it's math

But let’s be real. This is a math problem. How does the USOC put together a winning coalition behind Boston? The Europeans have their interests. Putin and Blatter have long memories.

One other piece to the dynamic. Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of Kuwait, one of the most influential figures in the Olympic movement, the head of the 205-member Assn. of National Olympic Committees, was just last month elected to the FIFA executive council.

Long term: does the sheikh himself want to be the next FIFA president? The next IOC president? He’s only 51. Are his allegiances going to play more with Blatter? Bach? A question often asked: what does the sheikh want?

In late October, ANOC is due to have a meeting in Washington, D.C.

In the aftermath of the FIFA indictments, one now wonders just how many of the delegates are inclined to show up in Washington — or, perhaps, as October nears, to find a convenient excuse to kind-of sort-of you-know not show up, because showing up would give the FBI jurisdiction over their persons.

Hey, everyone, let’s take a field trip to the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia! Rendition — no, we don’t call it that!

Not that anyone would be thinking anything like that — not after Chuck Blazer, once the top soccer official in the United States, identified as “co-conspirator #1” in paragraph 44 of the indictment, is said at the 2012 London Games to have secretly recorded former FIFA colleagues with a microphone hidden in the fob of his keychain.

At the London Games!

So let’s get this straight — the U.S. Department of Justice sought to use the former top U.S. Soccer official as a mole, as a rat, to gather evidence while at the IOC’s franchise, the Summer Games. Once that gets processed at the appropriate levels, that ought to go down just great for everyone in the United States in the Olympic scene for years and years to come.

Who, now, is going to have a cup of coffee in the bar with an American and wonder if the feds aren’t listening?

Blatter reportedly has not visited the U.S. in four years.

Justice and truth, such as they are, are very fine things.

Winning Olympic bids is quite another.

No one is saying the USOC could have done anything to have stopped the Justice Department from doing its thing.

But now the USOC has to live with the consequences.

Spending $75 million, or more, in chase of something that is not attainable is not a good idea. That money is not the USOC’s money, nor is it the IOC’s money, but it’s still a lot of money, and at the end this all comes down to relationships, perception — and math.

The USOC meets in late June in the Bay Area to consider what it ought to do next.

It should be obvious.

A wink, a nod, an op-ed, insurance, so many questions

Give the U.S. Olympic Committee credit. For years, as the dismal results from the New York 2012 and Chicago 2016 votes proved, it simply was not effectively in the Olympic bid game. What it needed was a wink and a nod, a high sign if you will, from the International Olympic Committee, that the IOC not only wanted a city to bid from the USOC, but which city. The USOC got that last week when IOC president Thomas Bach wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe two days before the USOC picked its city for the 2024 Summer Games. It picked Boston.

The fascinating question now is whether it’s genuinely in the IOC’s interest, in signaling that choice, for Boston to win.

Or whether in seemingly directing the USOC to pick Boston, the IOC is only playing the USOC — manipulating it so that the IOC gets as strong a field as possible for a 2024 race designed to attract maximum worldwide attention after the debacle that is the 2022 Winter Games race, which has devolved into a two-city derby, Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan.

The IOC won’t make its 2024 choice until the summer of 2017, two-plus years from now.

A lot can, and surely, will happen. Bids are possible from Rome; Paris; Germany; and elsewhere.

If the South Africans finally prove serious about getting in for 2024, they will run Durban. Because of the IOC’s stubborn refusal to allow bid visits — a plank that didn’t make it into the so-called “Agenda 2020” reforms, Bach’s 40-point plan approved last month in Monaco — the members will not be allowed to visit Boston. But most of the members will have been to seaside Durban, because that was where the IOC held its assembly in 2011.

To be perfectly blunt: IOC campaigns are not for the faint of heart or the politically naive.

So many variables.

What if, as is now the talk in some circles, FIFA, the international soccer federation, awards its 2026 World Cup in 2017 — in, say, May 2017? That is, just before the IOC vote.

Wouldn’t US Soccer love to get back on the opportunity it missed out on for 2018 and 2022, won by Russia and Qatar, respectively? Wouldn’t FIFA love to capitalize on the purportedly growing U.S. interest in soccer? Don’t think for a second, by the way, that there is much love lost between FIFA and the IOC.

What then for an American Olympic bid?

While Bach and FIFA’s Sepp Blatter — assuming Blatter is re-elected — sort things out, both for 2022 and 2026, this much is elemental: the way Bach runs the IOC is in many ways evocative of Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC president from 1980-2001.

Samaranch knew what he wanted. Bach seems to be following the same path.

As an example: in Monaco, Bach allocated two days for passage of Agenda 2020. Just like Samaranch would have done, however, he clearly had worked things out beforehand via personal meetings or on the phone (or, now, via email). All 40 measures got passed in just one day.

That is why the Bach op-ed piece in Tuesday’s Globe is so telling.

By itself, it was anodyne, a recitation of the passage in Monaco of the 40 Agenda 2020 bullet points.

The issue here is context.

The other three cities competing against Boston for USOC consideration: San Francisco, Washington, Los Angeles.

Did Bach’s op-ed run in the San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times? No.

Did it run in the New York Times, the de facto paper of record in the United States? No.

USA Today? No.

Let’s not be obtuse.

When unusual things present themselves, reasonable people are given to ask, what’s going on?

In this instance: why did the IOC take the unusual step of interjecting itself into the USOC’s domestic bid process?

Theory 1:

Last May, NBC paid $7.65 billion dollars (plus an extra $100 million “signing bonus” to be used for “the promotion of Olympism”) for the right to televise the Games in the United States from 2021 through 2032. The first Summer Games: 2024.

NBC has never -- and would never -- exercise its influence to lobby for a particular city. The network does not do that. That's the gospel truth.

However, this much is not rocket science: an East Coast time zone amounts to a home Games for NBC Olympics, which is based in Stamford, Connecticut.

Washington was never going to get 2024. Never. So that leaves Boston.

If this theory is plausible, then the Globe op-ed signals that what you see is what you get — Bach has given the USOC the wink and the nod and the rest of the next two-plus years is pretty much for show. Hey, Paris, Rome, Durban, whoever: thanks for playing and see you in Boston in 2024.

So is it really that simple? Or are things more layered?

Theory 2:

Everyone connected to the process knew Los Angeles had the best bid. Even the oddsmakers, who made it an even-money choice.

Indeed, the LA bid contained surprises that may never become public, including a big bang that unequivocally wowed everyone at the USOC and would have gone far to enhance the IOC’s furtherance of sustainability and legacy.

Further, the choice of Boston is layered with contradictions.

“Bostonians are well known for their enthusiasm for sport and the city has a great heritage in sport, science and education,” Bach told Associated Press after the selection.

Like Los Angeles doesn’t?

Los Angeles has three top-25 universities: Cal Tech, USC and UCLA. Boston has two: Harvard and MIT.

You want championships: Lakers? Kings? USC in college football? UCLA in college basketball?

The very thing that supposedly worked against Los Angeles in recent bid efforts — that the dorms at USC and UCLA served as housing in 1984 — is now a big plus for Boston’s 2024 bid? College dorms in Boston are a plus but a minus in LA? Say what?

There are dozens of universities in and around Boston. That’s the key demographic the IOC is seeking, and supposedly a big Boston plus. What about all the Cal State schools (LA, Northridge, Dominguez Hills, on and on), the Claremont colleges, the dozens and dozens of community colleges in and around Los Angeles?

The IOC, in Agenda 2020, talks big about sustainability. Yet Boston 2024 has to build an Olympic stadium while Los Angeles is home to the iconic Coliseum.

How much will that Olympic stadium cost? Let’s see. LA has been without an NFL team for 20 years. Last Monday, the owner of the St. Louis Rams — the Rams used to play in Southern California — announced plans to build a stadium in Inglewood, California, the LA Times noting that new stadiums tend to run to $1 billion or more. How is a new Olympic stadium in Boston going to prove in line — in any way — with the Agenda 2020 call for enhanced frugality?

And this: “I knew that Boston was destined to win this,” Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said after the USOC decision. As the Boston Globe reported, Boston 2024 paid about $1 million for an insurance policy of up to $25 million to protect City Hall “from any liabilities associated with the bid,” signing off on the policies Wednesday — that is, the day before the USOC decision.

So interesting. The standard USOC bid city agreement between calls for a city to pay $25 million in “liquidated damages” to the USOC if for some reason something freaky happens and the city drops out. For those not familiar with the term, “liquidated damages” is fancy lawyer talk for “cash money.” Essentially, if indeed that is what the policy went for, what Boston 2024 did was shift it so that $25 million is now some insurance company's worry.

But why?

And why Wednesday, the day before the USOC meeting?

The Globe report also said that Boston officials were the only group from among the four bid cities that insisted on buying this kind of insurance. Why? Also, you know, this kind of insurance takes a little bit of time to line up. It's not like you go down to your neighborhood insurance agent and say, hey, I'd like to lay down $1 million for $25 million, assuming again this is what it was for. Did Boston get a wink and a nod from the USOC in advance, and if so, when?

So many questions.

Good thing Boston officials have pledged transparency. For the sake of Journalism 101, let's hope it's retroactive, not just going forward.

More questions: what was at the basis of all that vigorous debate the USOC said it went through?

The USOC has suggested it will explain why Boston -- perhaps as soon as early this week.

In the meantime, to stick to the core of Theory 2, is it that the IOC could prefer Boston because Los Angeles — especially with the support of key Olympic insiders — might well have been a sure winner?

Did Bach, in any event, want Boston to assert primacy over those others, who were known to prefer LA?

There is this, though, which is easy: it’s in the interest of the IOC president to secure as many cities as possible for whatever race is being run.

No question Bach wants a U.S. bid.

Even so, does he also have a counter-interest for 2024, to make Europe look good, particularly after six European cities dropped out for 2022?

The first European Games, in Baku, Azerbaijan, are due to be held this summer, and will almost surely be a success, giving renewed momentum to that continent’s bids. Always, always, always remember, too: the IOC is Eurocentric.

At most, Bach got three U.S. votes in 2013 for the presidency (there were then three U.S. IOC members, now four, with the addition of USOC board chairman Larry Probst). There are 40-something IOC members from Europe.

Do not be fooled, not even for a second, by the statement from the White House, which said President Obama and the First Lady “strongly support” the Boston bid. Even if the president does, and let's assume for argument he really does, for the sake of securing 55 or so IOC votes, the president's words are -- sorry to say -- dust in the wind.

Note: Bach has visited more than 90 heads of state since being elected IOC president in September 2013. President Obama is not among them.

Note, too: the statement was issued by the White House press secretary. When the president wants to emphasize something, as he did when California Sen. Barbara Boxer last Wednesday announced her impending retirement, that comes out as a different kind of statement — that’s from Obama himself.

These things matter a lot in politics, and they matter for a White House that, as the IOC will readily recall, sent a delegation to Sochi only last February that absolutely was designed to signal a protest about the Russian anti-gay law.

It's instructive to observe that Bach deliberately made public the official letter of support and sympathy he wrote to French president François Hollande after last week's terror attacks in Paris. One can argue whether such a letter is eminently decent as well as a show of humanity or treads dangerously close to the kind of thing you might see from a head of state, which Bach assuredly is not. At any rate, several world leaders attended Sunday's massive rally in Paris, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of of Israel and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. The United States? Represented by its ambassador to France, Jane D. Hartley.

In the Olympic world, where protocol is hugely significant, appearances matter, too. And can be long remembered.

The White House statement about Boston 2024 also said, “The city has taught all of us what it means to be Boston Strong,” a reference to the 2013 marathon bombings.

Bach, in his comments to AP, said, “The Boston bid will be a strong one.”

With profound and enduring respect for the victims of the marathon attacks, this gentle note: the New York 2012 bid was launched after the Twin Towers went down. The IOC was not sufficiently moved, nearly four years later, when the 2012 vote was taken, to award the Games to New York; they went to London. By the time the 2024 vote is taken, the events that shook Boston near the finish line of the 2013 marathon will similarly have been four years prior.

Bach also told AP about Boston, “The bid also has the great potential to build on the strength of the athletes from the U.S. Olympic team,” adding, “U.S athletes have a worldwide reputation and will be a huge asset for the bid.”

This, to be diplomatic, is phraseology that Bach has borrowed from his predecessor, Jacques Rogge, when Rogge was asked by reporters to asses Chicago 2016 and New York 2012. Recall how those worked out.

To be clear: the USOC has, since 2009, made great strides in building relationships internationally. There seems to be zero question Bach has taken an interest in Boston.

There are also so many questions yet to be answered about why.

And about whether the time is right for the USOC, and Boston, and whether together they can craft a winning narrative to an IOC membership that is no longer widely hostile to American interests, as was the case during the Rogge years, but perhaps still wary and likely knows not very much about Boston.

The USOC is in the 2024 game with one objective only — to win. That has been made abundantly clear, time and again.

In that spirit, this: the Agenda 2020 rules now allow for five exceptions to the rule that IOC members must retire at age 70. In Monaco, one of the five exceptions was immediately granted to Gian Franco Kasper, who is Swiss and the head of the international ski federation.

This is what Kasper told AP about a U.S. 2024 bid, and this is what the USOC is still very much up against:

“Times have changed a little bit, but it depends how they will present their candidature. If they,” meaning the Americans,” come back with the old arrogance they had before, then of course it will not be helpful. But I think they have learned the lesson, too.”

Agenda 2020 goes 40-for-40

MONACO — To much self-promotion and -congratulation, the International Olympic Committee on Monday “unanimously” enacted all 40 points of president Thomas Bach’s review and potential reform plan, dubbed “Agenda 2020.” The potential game-changer: approval of a digital TV channel. Other significant elements: shifts in the bid process as well as to the Olympic program.

The action Monday gave Bach what he craved, approval of what he has variously described as a "jigsaw puzzle" and a “white paper.” Now comes the hard work: implementation.

How to balance considerations such as finance and the essence of Olympic tradition? Should the bobsled track for the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea be moved to save money? Isn’t it ridiculous — or worse — to pressure the Koreans to give up building a track to move the event to, say, Japan, when, for instance, the matter of the 1936 Berlin marathon, won by Korean Kee Chong Sohn, who had to compete under the Japanese flag, is still very much alive in Seoul and precincts beyond?

To move it to, say, the United States? Canada? Europe? Wouldn’t that make the Olympics something of a united world championships, the very thing Sport Accord and international judo federation president Marius Vizer had proposed just last year?

The Koreans bid twice for the Games, for 2010 and 2014, before winning for 2018. It’s not as if they didn’t know the Winter Olympics included a bobsled run, right?

More of the struggles to come:

Yay for a move from “sports” to “events” if that means the possibility of fresh additions to the program, and particularly in the Summer Games — say, for instance, surfing.

But with a cap of 10,500 athletes except in “special cases,” the policy affirmed anew Monday, which of the established sports can be counted on to give up spots to newcomers? Track and field? Swimming? Shooting? Rowing?

In a word: ha.

To be sure, Monday ushered in evolution, not revolution.

In a style that can only be described as only in the IOC, the 40 measures were voted on one by one and by a show of hands, the 96 members in attendance passing each resolution in what was described from the head table as “unanimously,” even though it was sometimes plain not all hands went up.

To be abundantly clear: no hands went up to register a vote against.

Why did the IOC not register the votes on each measure through electronic ballots, which — in December 2014 — would be simple enough? Which the IOC actually does (though it does not attribute votes cast to individual members) for its bid-city ballots?

For those who might be befuddled, it must be understood that what transpired Monday is, in its way, progress.

In IOC terms, it amounted to something that might be termed transparency. The votes were shown on closed-circuit television that was beamed out to the internet. Thus some — if not all — the members could actually be seen raising their hands.

Moreover, the IOC is not, repeat not, a democracy.

Here is another fundamental principle:

The IOC works best when the president is firmly in control.

Bach, who is German, was elected in Buenos Aires in September 2013, replacing Jacques Rogge of Belgium.

Rogge served from 2001. He took over from Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, who served for 21 years.

Rogge sat Monday at the head table. Bach referred to him, among others, in the ceremonial introductions of the address that opened Sunday night’s 127th IOC session. That was, well, it. Not a word from the former president.

Since being elected in Buenos Aires, Bach has clearly sought to model himself after Samaranch, who operated with a direct yet deft touch.

For more than a year, Bach has worked energetically to secure buy-in across, within and without the Olympic movement for Agenda 2020. Though Rogge was not invited Monday to speak, Didier Burkhalter, president of the Swiss confederation, was — the IOC, of course, based in Lausanne. Agenda 2020, Burkhalter said, would enable the movement to “be proactive and change rather than be changed.”

The key item on the docket was always the creation of the digital TV channel.

To get there, though, the IOC had to work through hours of agenda items.

First up Monday morning: changes to the bid process, including a provision that in exceptional circumstances would allow events to be held outside host cities or countries.

Insiders noted that many of the bid changes, aimed at streamlining and reducing the cost of campaigning, evoked the Madrid 2020 bid that lost out to Tokyo, also in Buenos Aires.

It takes nothing away from the winning Tokyo bid to note that with as with many things in the Olympic universe, it can be a matter of timing: Madrid’s bids, particularly the 2020 campaign, its third in a row, may well have articulated an apt strategy but caught the IOC at a wrong time.

Around lunch time Monday in Monaco, the IOC moved to change the Olympic program from its traditional focus on “sports” to “events,” a potential boon for sports such as surfing, skateboarding, cricket, climbing and, as soon as the Tokyo 2020 Games, baseball and softball — again, if that is, spots can be found around that 10,500 cap.

“This is really a major step forward in the modernization of the Olympic Games,” Bach said as it passed, of course unanimously.

By mid-afternoon, the members affirmed their support for what’s called “Principle 6,” including non-discrimination on sexual orientation, a response to the firestorm over legislation in Russia before the 2014 Games.

“This is a very important step,” Bach said. “Congratulations.”

Approval of the TV channel came right after that.

Bach, speaking from the head table, called such a channel “crucial” for Olympic athletes and values between editions of the Games.

Yiannis Exarchos, head of Olympic Broadcasting Services, said it would be “the always-on, multimedia platform,” aimed at being the “ultimate” Olympic content source, initially digital only.

“This will be a truly collaborative effort [among] the Olympic family,” he said, also calling it “a challenge of Olympic proportions.”

“This will be a historic step in our existence and one we should embrace,” he urged the members.

Start-up costs were fixed at roughly $446 million euros, plus a 10 percent cushion, meaning $490 million euros all-in, or $601 million at current exchange rates.

Ser Miang Ng of Singapore, a former vice president who now chairs the IOC finance commission, said the channel represented a “substantial but necessary” investment. Break-even, he said: seven to 10 years.

“These figures are more than achievable,” said Bach, who chaired the TV channel working group.

“I think this is an excellent concept and the sooner we can launch this the better,” Larry Probst, the U.S. Olympic Committee chairman and new IOC member, said from the floor.

After the channel was approved, once more unanimously, Bach said, “This is a great, great step forward. I wish all the ones who will be involved in making this happen really good luck. This is really a historical step for the IOC an the Olympic movement. Thank you very much for your approval.”

Richard Peterkin, the witty IOC member from the Caribbean nation of St. Lucia, tweeted early in Monday’s session:

Looks like we will have an abundance of unanimous acceptance votes on the recommendations. Either a good sign or we are a bunch of sheep.

— Richard Peterkin (@rncpeterkin) December 8, 2014

A few minutes later, he posted another tweet:

Just to clarify. There's nothing wrong with sheep. They taste great, make lovely wool sweaters, and know a good thing when they see it.

— Richard Peterkin (@rncpeterkin) December 8, 2014

After lunch, yet again:

My arm hurts from voting yes so often. would it be different if the votes were by blind ballot? I doubt it. Other options in the future.

— Richard Peterkin (@rncpeterkin) December 8, 2014

From the floor in the afternoon, Peterkin said, speaking directly to Bach, “Like President Obama, you are a strong proponent of change. I hope you have more success than he has.”

Bach had predicted at a news conference Saturday that all would go smoothly here.

Of course he did. He had lined everything up in advance, Samaranch-style.

It was “very encouraging,” he said at that news conference, “to see that all the stakeholders of the Olympic movement are actually supporting this Olympic Agenda 2020,” including representatives of the international sports federations, summer and winter, the national Olympic committees and athletes committees.

Beyond which, as longtime IOC member and former vice president Dick Pound pointed out in an interview Monday, the topics themselves lent themselves to an easy show of hands in favor of yes votes.

“It’s pretty much motherhood and apple pie,” Pound said, adding, “These things are obvious. Friction will be in the events. What does athletics,” meaning track and field, “have to give to create some space for new sports? What does shooting have to give? What does swimming have to give? And there will be a lot of wailing about that,” down the line.

“You look at the team sports. Do you cut a 14-team draw down to 12? There are lots of ways to slice the pie.”

Pound served as IOC vice president under Samaranch. The comparisons between Bach and Samaranch seemed manifest.

Referring to Bach, Pound said, “He’s well prepared. You look at those committees, especially the outsiders. He has got good traction there. So you’re getting a lot of good thought having gone into it. Things have been circulated. You read them — there’s very little there that has a big hook out there that you want to grab onto and want to fight. I think it has been well-managed, well-directed, well-meaning."

Pound continued: “… I’m trying to think, somebody raised the visit issue, very tentatively,” meaning whether the members could visit cities bidding for the Games, a notion Bach had emphatically shot down before all arrived in Monaco.

“There may be people with hair my color who may object to having to retire before the age of 70 or something. We’ll see. I don’t think anyone will throw themselves in front of the train for that purpose.”

The image of whether to tinker in any significant respect with the age limit didn’t even begin to come up until 5:45 p.m. — too late in the day, really, for anybody to do anything about it, given that Bach had determined mid-afternoon that he was going to hustle the members through all 40 bullet points in one day.

As the clock ticked toward 6 p.m., Bach did call on Vitaly Smirnov, the Russian member who holds a special place in the IOC, what is called the doyen, the longest-serving member. Smirnov, carefully reading from a script, backed the measure on the table that would allow for a one-time extension of a member’s term beyond age 70, to 74, for a maximum of five cases at a given time.

So deft.

So Samaranch-like, really.

“Even in, as you say, my wildest dreams, I would not have expected this,” Bach said in a wrap-up news conference Monday night, referring to the 40-for-40 unanimous yes votes, going on to deflect credit away from himself and onto the members, just the way Samaranch used to:

“It showed the great determination of the members for these reforms to make this progress and to make this happen.”

Francesco Ricci Bitti, president of the international tennis federation and the association of summer Olympic international sports federations, said, “We did open today a big window but most of the work still needs to be done. That’s the most difficult part of our job. It’s a historical day.

“Now we have to proceed step by step. If someone has signed a contract like Tokyo, they cannot change everything. There must be a balance.”

Bach's Agenda 2020 revival meeting

MONACO — Proclaiming, “We are successful,” International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said on the eve of a potentially historic session convened to consider a review and potential reform plan he has dubbed “Agenda 2020” that “success is the best reason for change.” “If we do not address [upcoming] challenges here and now,” Bach told the more than 100 IOC members at the seaside Forum Grimaldi, “we will be hit by them very soon. If we do not drive these changes ourselves, others will drive us to them. We want to be the leaders of change and not the object of change."

Mindful that he was speaking Sunday evening not just to the IOC membership but via the internet to a worldwide audience, Bach sought to turn the opening of the 127th IOC session into something of a revival meeting before the committee gets down to the hard work Monday morning of considering the 40 bullet points that make up Agenda 2020.

In all, the plan amounts to the most wide-ranging action since the IOC enacted a series of moves in late 1999 after the Salt Lake City corruption scandal. The IOC will debate and vote, one by one, on each of the 40 recommendations; debate and voting are expected to carry through Monday and Tuesday.

This assembly comes as several countries, all European, have been scared off by the costs of hosting the Games, in particular by the $51 billion figure associated with the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. A number withdrew from the 2022 Winter Games contest, leaving only Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, and it is far from clear that Almaty will stay in the race through the finish line next summer.

The key Agenda 2020 item: creation of a digital Olympic television channel.

Also on the docket: shifts in the bid process, a transition in the Olympic program from its current focus on “sports” to “events,” a renewed commitment to non-discrimination and a number of elements dealing with financial transparency and governance.

Bach said in a news conference Saturday that he heads into the two-day workshop confident he has the support of key stakeholders for all 40 points.

Anything, though, is possible at an Olympic session. At the Sochi get-together last February, there were 211 “interventions,” as comments and questions from the floor are called in IOC-speak.

Behind the scenes, however, it was thought that the only one of the 40 that might draw real pushback is Recommendation 37, which calls for the full IOC session — upon the recommendation of the policy-making executive board — to allow for a one-time extension of an IOC member’s term beyond the current age limit of 70, to 74. The extension would be allowed for a maximum of five cases at any given time.

The issue? There might be some significant number of members, well beyond four, who are turning 70 who want to stay on beyond 74.

The other complication bubbling backstage Sunday night?

The second piece to air on German television alleging doping and other serious irregularities rooted in Russian sport, particularly track and field.

The airing of the production can hardly be seen as accidental. After all, it's on German television, in the days before and, now, during what should be the big moment for Bach, the German IOC president.

At issue, potentially: after a year pressing Agenda 2020, would potential misconduct somewhere in the reaches of the so-called "Olympic family" steal or dim the spotlight?

The first show aired last Wednesday; the next day, track's governing body, the IAAF, put out a news release saying it noted "grave allegations" and the federation's ethics commission had already launched an investigation. Late Sunday, the IAAF put out another release, this one saying an English-language transcript from Sunday's show would be forwarded to the ethics panel.

Bach made no mention from the lectern of such matters. Instead, he sought Sunday evening one final time to press his case for Agenda 2020.

“If I would deliver this speech in a theater,” he said, making like Hamlet, “I would say with an ironic smile, of course: to change or be changed, that is the question.”

Of course, in that scene, a despondent Hamlet is contemplating suicide.

On Sunday evening in Monaco, Bach — since he chose Hamlet, and now if we move just a few lines down in the scene, the president cheerfully bearing “the insolence of Office’’ — proved relentlessly upbeat.

“Whenever you initiate change,” he asked rhetorically, “you have to answer three questions: Why? What? How?”

To begin, he answered, “We need to change because sport today is too important in society to ignore the rest of society. We are not living on an island, we are living in the middle of a modern, diverse, digital society.”

And more, here speaking in French, with this fascinating, never-before-spelled out explication: “If we want our values of Olympism — the values of excellence, respect, friendship, dialogue, diversity, non-discrimination, tolerance, fair play, solidarity, development and peace — if we want these values to remain relevant in society, the time for change is now.”

This, too, back in English: “For us, change has to be more than a cosmetic effort or a procedure. Change has to have a goal. This goal is progress. Progress for us means strengthening sport in society by virtue of our values.”

That was the why.

He turned to the what.

“We are living in a world more fragile than ever,” Bach said, one beset by “political crisis, financial crisis, health crisis, terrorism, war and civil war,” one in which the “Olympic message is perhaps more relevant than ever.”

But: people not only have to “hear our message, they have to believe in our message, they have to ‘get the message.’ “

Thus the dozens of action points in Agenda 2020, he said, adding what has become over the past year one of his favorite taglines: “We have an interest and a responsibility to get the couch potatoes off the couch. Only children playing sport can be future athletes. Only children playing sport can enjoy the educational and health values of sport.”

The digital channel, he said, is intended — in part — to give Olympic athletes and sports the “worldwide media exposure they deserve” between editions of the Games.

“This modern world,” he said, “demands more transparency, more participation, higher standards of integrity. This modern world takes less for granted, has no place for complacency, questions even those with the highest reputation. This world takes much less on faith.”

Agenda 2020, he declared, takes on these matters under the broad themes of sustainability, credibility and youth.

In another of his favorite lines, Bach said, Agenda 2020 is “like a jigsaw puzzle,” adding, “Every piece, every recommendation has the same importance. Only when you put all these 40 pieces together [do] you see the whole picture. You see progress in ensuring the success of the Olympic Games, progress in safeguarding the Olympic values and progress in strengthening sport in society.”

Which led him to this third, and final, question — how to achieve such progress?

It needs, he said, cooperation.

Since being elected IOC president in September 2013, he said, he had met with 95 heads of state or government, declaring, “In most of these meetings the Olympic Agenda 2020 and our relations with the world of politics played a major role.”

Unsaid: he has not met with President Obama, and seems unlikely to take such a meeting before Obama’s term expires in January 2017, the White House still frosty over Chicago’s first-round 2009 exit in the 2016 Summer Games vote won by Rio de Janeiro — though the U.S. Olympic Committee has, to its credit, made great strides in repairing many “Olympic family” relationships since.

Bach, as expected, touted what he called a “new sense of cooperation and partnership” with the United Nations.

As he neared the end of his remarks, Bach said:

“Dear friends and colleagues, now this Olympic Agenda 2020 is in your hands. Now it is up to you to show that this is our vision for the future of the Olympic movement.

Referring to the French baron widely credited with founding the modern movement some 120 years ago, Bach said, “Our founder Pierre de Coubertin, I am sure, is following us closely these days and with great sympathy, because he was always a man of reforms.

“He said, ‘Courage … and hope! … charge boldly through the clouds and do not be afraid. The future belongs to you.’ “

Bach added a moment later, turning to his catchphrase from last year’s presidential election, “Let us demonstrate the true meaning of unity in diversity. Let us together shape an even brighter future for this magnificent, truly global Olympic movement.”

"The new face of Russia"

ADLER, Russia — The Sochi 2014 Winter Games drew Sunday night to a close, an Olympics intent on projecting the image of a strong and confident new Russia across this vast country and to the world beyond, with a mighty Russian team awakening the echoes of the mighty Soviet sport system to prideful spectator cheers of “Ro-ssi-ya! Ro-ssi-ya!” Albeit, over 17 days, to the beat of “Get Lucky” by a Russian police choir. And cheerful volunteers yelling, “Good morning!” while dancing to the Black Eyed Peas.

“This is the new face of Russia, our Russia,” Dmitry Chernyshenko, the head of the Sochi 2014 organizing committee, said Sunday night at the closing ceremony to more cheers. “And for us, these Games are the best-ever.”

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